COVID-19 has escalated healthcare’s decision-making demands, reinforcing the industry’s need for highly skilled analytics team members. As a result, health systems face mounting pressure to hire the best-suited analytics talent in a timely manner and with minimal burden on existing team members.
Five proven inclusive strategies will help hiring managers efficiently build an analytics team that can adapt to healthcare’s shifting environment and also fit within an organization’s culture:
1. Open positions to remote employees and conduct interviews via video conferencing.
2. Insert “tollgates” into the hiring process.
3. Use scenario-based role play to assess many competencies concurrently.
4. Assess cultural fit.
5. Follow up with and provide feedback to all candidates.
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COVID-19 has placed immense pressure on healthcare organizations to have capable, reliable, and diverse analytics team members to aid healthcare leaders in making data-informed decisions. The need for robust analytics, however, isn’t new to healthcare and will be just as critical after the emergency phases of the pandemic. As the industry further digitizes, analytics demand will also grow, driving organizations to prioritize sound strategies for hiring the best-suited analytics talent as efficiently as possible.
According to a 2018 survey by HealthLeaders Media, organizations have prioritized hiring analytics staff over every other role except care coordinators. Amid COVID-19, U.S. (and global) health systems need sound analytics to study pandemic patterns in their region to achieve the following:
Healthcare technology and professional services companies that focus on enabling massive analytics-driven improvements continually screen and interview candidates for analytics-based roles. In the process, these organizations have identified some best inclusive practices for attracting top analytics talent from a diverse candidate pool and continually improving the hiring process.
Based on repeated improvement cycles around hiring analytics talent, five best practices have emerged to help healthcare organizations efficiently attract, hire, and retain the best analytics team members to identify and support meaningful outcomes improvement:
As many organizations become more comfortable having employees dispersed around the country (and globe), they’re creating inclusive job descriptions that transcend geographic, racial, ethnic, and gender barriers. As a result, these employers are widening the candidate pool and conducting more interactions online. Also, a remote interview process that accommodates dispersed candidates by using video conferencing software (e.g., Zoom and WebEx) saves time and money. Interviewers now have many practical tools for interacting in a web-based interview, such as cameras for face-to-face interaction, virtual whiteboards, screen-sharing, text chat, and more.
Tollgates are ways to identify candidates who are not a good fit early in the hiring process, stopping them from going through all steps, thereby improving the process efficiency. However, to prevent tollgates from disparately impacting underrepresented groups, hiring teams must ensure these checkpoints are accessible regardless of gender, race, or ethnic background. The following inclusive hiring tollgate examples save time and narrow the applicant pool to the best matches:
Candidates who pass the basic tollgate steps then undergo structured interviews with the hiring manager and often one or two additional team members, who represent the team’s diversity. An effective interview helps hiring teams determine cultural fit, as well as validates technical skills and appropriate domain knowledge.
Role play can help interviewers assess many technical skills and domain knowledge in a short period. Interviewers can use a real-world example of analytics needs at the hiring organization to stage an exercise that puts the candidate in the driver’s seat of the position for which they’re applying. A scenario-based role play involves four main steps:
Creating good quality, reusable role play takes some work. Still, that upfront effort will pay high dividends in helping determine the strongest candidates for an analytics role in a relatively tight time frame (60 to 90 minutes). The role play exercise will also help separate real analytics talent from basic report writers. And, while interviewers still need to ask the candidate a series of questions outside the role play, the exercise will break up the interview and make it more engaging and memorable for the candidate.
In quick succession with the role play exercise, hiring teams can perform a cultural fit interview. This assessment involves a more traditional technique of asking candidates standard questions to understand their style of working and collaboration. These questions should be consistent for all candidates and focus on the most important attributes for working effectively with the hiring organization and analytics staff.
The cultural fit assessment also ensures the candidate’s personal goals and mission align with the organization. For example, hiring managers will want to determine how a candidate relates to the organization’s core values and will support companywide efforts around those values, such as annual unconscious bias training. Taking the time to ensure cultural fit can help identify candidates with potential as long-term team members—meaning lower turnover and improved overall hiring process efficacy.
The hiring team should follow up with each candidate in a timely fashion and provide feedback—for both hired and non-hired candidates. In the event of delayed hiring decisions, hiring teams must advise all candidates of the nature of the delay and the new timeline. Prompt and considerate feedback creates a positive experience for the interviewee and a lasting opinion of the organization. A positive impression impacts the likelihood a candidate will accept an offer or apply again as they gain experience and skillsets, or a more fitting position materializes. Regardless of hiring outcomes, a candidate will likely share a positive experience with peers, thereby driving more analytics talent to the organization.
COVID-19-era decision-making demands have reinforced healthcare’s need for highly skilled analytics team members and an efficient, effective hiring process. Strategies to hire the right people quickly with minimal burden on existing team members are critical. Following best practices for hiring essential analytics talent and continually adapting to healthcare’s shifting environment will help organizations attract and retain the most capable people, thus enabling massive, measurable, data-informed healthcare improvement now and well into the future.
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